Prophetic visions of a world of living technology

Here's a test for you. Read these two statements: "Life is not a scientific term" and "I don't want to be lost in a world of pure, indulgent imagination". An artist made one, a scientist the other: who do you think said what?

Some background might help solve the puzzle. One of the statements was made by Christian Kerrigan, the first digital artist in residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He is opening his V&A studio to the public this week to show the fruits of his six months' work there.

Kerrigan uses 3D design software to create what he calls "digital drawings", sometimes of imaginary living technology, sometimes of more abstract scenes whose scale might be galactic or microscopic. But these pictures, along with the objects, texts and video that Kerrigan makes, are not meant to be purely aesthetic. He sees his work as a visual language for the investigation of nature, technology, the relationship between them and mortality.

At the V&A, close-up photographs of cast resin contaminated with flour and other materials float in Kerrigan's 3D worlds, creating images redolent of biological fluidity (see Bloodline, 2010, left - click on image to see it larger). Printed as large transparencies, these will cover the studio windows, filtering the light entering the room as they also filter the viewer's interpretation of what they see inside it.

One of the things viewers will see in the studio is a "chemical sculpture": a tank containing the protective skins that algae have formed after being placed in a strongly alkaline environment. Visitors will also be able to see video of "living technology" in action as seen through a microscope. And Kerrigan is showing material from a work in progress as well; a technique for using living cells to move ink around in a printed image.

Kerrigan is being guided through this watery world of biotechnology by Martin Hanczyc, a biochemist at the Center for Fundamental Living Technology at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, and the scientist in the quotation puzzle above. Hanczyc is working to create an artificial "protocell" that could be a foundation for technology which looks after itself in the ways that living things do.

The pair have collaborated since they discovered a shared interest in the blurred borderlands between nature and technology. "It's important to recognise that technology is invading us sooner than we think," says Kerrigan.

While Hanczyc is busy designing the footsoldiers for that invasion, Kerrigan is devising an artistic language to help us discover what it will mean. This language of images also helps Hanczyc explain and promote his own work.

Kerrigan isn't presenting coherent, worked-out visions of the future. His art, he says, draws on history and metaphor to give people ways of thinking about what may come. He sees his work as an inquiry, and he doesn't predetermine the results.

This echoes Hanczyc's approach to science: both men like to learn from process. Hanczyc says:

"You have to ask, 'What is the system telling me?' I'm not the kind of scientist who has an engineering approach, who pushes molecules into a preconceived hole. There's a lot to be learned when things don't fit into the hole. If you're going to create life from not-life, you need to try to listen to what the molecules are telling you."

This contrasts with the approach to creating synthetic life that has proved successful for Craig Venter, says Kerrigan. Whereas Venter engineers a system so that it does what he wants, Hanczyc and Kerrigan observe a system to learn from it.

Encased Nature, 2010: a water-based installation at the V&A as part of the earlier exhibition Thirty-Six Views of Edo (Image: Christian Kerrigan)

They also share what might be called a post-humanist perspective on life. Kerrigan calls his ongoing body of work The 200-Year Continuum, because he wants to consider things on a timescale greater than any that an individual human could know.

Similarly, Hanczyc suggests that, although we may consider ourselves to be the highest branch on the tree of earthly life, we may not have that position forever. Evolution is not all about us, he says, and perhaps we are not the future.

They explore these ideas without trespassing on each other's field of expertise, agreeing that the boundary between nature and technology is blurring, but not the divide between art and science. Hanczyc says that art and science involve different ways of thinking. Kerrigan thinks through images, with a visual language inspired by materials and processes of construction, whereas Hanczyc works on things that exist independently of anyone's interpretation of them, and his intuitions must be checked by experiments.

But each values the other's insights. Hence the two quotes I began with: it was the artist who wanted intellectual rigour and the scientist who recognised the need to think outside science.

Christian Kerrigan's exhibition Living is at the Sackler Centre, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from 10 am to 5:30 pm, 25 to 30 June, with late opening til 10 pm on Friday.